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James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech
snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."
Even though it's since transitioned to Apache, Oracle still deserves to be graded on their handling of OO.o.
While I applaud James for his contribution to Java, I am afraid he's of no consequence to its direction now.
It would have been better if he proposed some kind of direction Oracle should have taken with Java.
Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!
I think it's too early to tell, as James Gosling just lacks the experience most people are used to from those like him — there's still a lot left for him to learn from his father, industry veteran Jim Goose. Once his father retires, though, I think James will get to chance to really spread his wings, and we'll probably see some very good ideas of his take flight. For now, though, I think he's just a bit green around the beak.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Dhu, The main usage of Java is on the server side, where it's fairly popular. Java skils is still the most sought after skill when it comes to developers. There are a few popular desktop applications written in Java, Minecraft comes to mind :) And of course we have the slightly modified version of Java that powers every Android application. So Java is still around and kicking.....
As to the big Reds handling of Java, out of the gate it was pretty bad in it's interactions with the Java community. Not surprising as they axed most of the folks that where doing that part back at Sun...... But they actually got better with interacting with the Java community lately, could improve more but still kinda on the right track.
SPARC has seen more advances in the 4 years under ORACLE then in the previous 15 years under Sun. I actually enjoy reading about their tech every now and then. But unless they open up Solaris again to attract the open source community the only thing that keeps it alive is backwards compatibility of legacy software.
ZFS is on the right path but it still isn't quite where it needs to be. For example I can't tell it not to reallocate blocks on write so I can't force overwrites of sensitive data -- which is required in several industries that Sun used to be strong in. Someone in ZFS land needs to create an ioctl/fctl to fix that. The boot system also needs to be clear if it is trying to mount a ZFS or UFS disk since that is a bit tricky when the disk looks like both. They should also fix the fsck stub so it knows about ZFS and have a /usr/lib/zfs/fsck even if it is just a link to zfs status.
How is SMF better than init? They even bothered to break init so you can't pull SMF out the system if you don't want it. They now link init and smf to a number of libraries that have horrible security records. Do you want the main process in your system linking in libraries that need security updates on a monthly basis?
I know how SMF is worse, it is slower to start up, it is indeterminate in its start up state and order, it keeps its data in unauditable binary files an it takes far longer to shut down. It also isn't very good at what init was, which was making sure programs always ran. Solaris 11.1 turns off auditing, then syslog before killing off all user processes which means you have no idea what a rogue process did when it was told the system is shutting down. That appears to be a result of someone at Oracle deciding all the disks need to be mounted before starting syslog, which requires lots of extra crud to be running like NFS, RPC and whatever YP is called this decade and it appears that stuff is all trusted to shut down cleanly without the need of logging. At least with init, you could have two different syslog entries for the different run levels so you could make sure everything was logged and audited.
The number of bugs in Solaris 10 is far worse than Solaris 9. You can't build a light weight Solaris 10 or 11 system. Under 10, you could build a Solaris 9 container which would only run a bare number of processes but not any more since that feature was pulled out of 11. I have a number of Solaris 9 systems that are running less than a dozen packages but I'm one of the people who feel that if there isn't any unneeded software on a system, hackers can't use it hack the system.
Solaris 11 also has managed to break decades of sanity of using ifconfig to build network stacks. Now there are other tools that do part of the job and then can allow ificonfig to finish the job.
At least with Solaris 11.1 they created a tool to create smf xml files which means they are now no longer hand crafted which means a tool can be written to turn them back into rc.X scripts and they can be put back where they belong. Now if I could just remove svc.* without installing a fake to keep the contract open, I would be back up to the integrity level of a Solaris 9 system.
Where is the grade for VirtualBox. As opposed to the others on the list, I would give them an A+ for their stewardship of VirtualBox so far. They have released regular updates and bugfixes. I have run into zero problems running Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows in VMs. The UI has gradually improved. The project is still open source, and they actually provide binaries for every major OS.
While Solaris itself is no longer relevant outside of some enterprise niches, it has an actively-developed OSS fork named "illumos", developed by former-Sun hackers working at several different private companies. There are several distributions -- I use SmartOS in particular, and OmniTI's OmniOS is also excellent.
It is still there as an optional item in the installer, not selected by default (because that is the way it should be).
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.
This comment, and the other 3 that replied to it before me, show a huge lack of knowledge or care. Oracle isn't very transparent, but it only takes a small amount of effort to see that neither MySQL or VirtualBox are in danger of perishing. There are many people who left Oracle/Sun/MySQL for Percona and MariaDB/SkySQL, but most of those people left for their own reasons and *many* left before and Sun or Oracle influence was upon them.
I get to see it from the inside, and MySQL is growing and has more market share than either of the other competitors. The newest developments are really spectacular improvements. I get to see the walled garden from the inside, and it's anything but dying, it is in better shape as a product than it has ever been. Oracle is anything but stupid and doesn't have a track record of making stupid decisions with their products, which can't be said for some companies. Oracle is putting a lot of resources into MySQL to make it even better.
VirtualBox is a fairly decent team and they are not just working on VirtualBox, there is a reason it continues to be developed and the technology doesn't have a dead end to it.
I think that most of the comments I've read are uneducated and purely people spouting off uninformed opinions mixed with conjecture and hyperbole. The people I work with are the brightest group of people I've ever had the privilege of working with, there are some really notable folks that work on MySQL and you wouldn't know it unless you paid attention to the blogosphere.
I completely agree. Solaris "was" a great OS. With some very notable monster issues. Oracle has effectively killed Solaris. I simple can't use it anymore. The licensing costs of it and the software that runs on it are more than my total IT budget. Despite it's fantastic attributes I can no longer afford to put this in my Datacenter. With on demand virtualisation I can not afford to have to worry about things like. "Am I going to violate my license conditions if I spin up X more?"
I had an Oracle sale rep try to sell my that ridiculous Oracle stack in a box Exadata/logic. I was almost crying in laughter by the end of the sales presentation. 2/3 of the way through I stood up and wrote on the white board "Tell me how this isn't vendor lock in?". I called time at the 1 hour mark. I ended the meeting with the simple statement. Everything you have shown me is all about "vendor lock in" every word out of your mouths just re-enforced this concept. I had one question for you the entire meeting and you simple could not in any way respond to it.
So I priced everything I might need on Amazon. Using free and commercial AMI's with the odd vendor SW package tossed in. My first year spend was 1/25th of the Exadata discounted opening price. Nothing on the EC2 list had anything to do with Solaris. This is how you kill something. Make it financially ridiculous.
Issues with Solaris. That should have been addressed in the Oracle years.
- Package manager was brain dead. apt, yum are far better. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
- Patching made no sense. You have no idea what packages are patched with a patch. Patches were just binary disk vomit that spewed crud all over the system. Impossible in the real world to build any sort of verification around them. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
- Zones: Are a nightmare of security and privilege. I don't care what any says a zone is just a change root jail. Which means you will only every be as up-to-date as the host system. And it means you must be compatible and tested against the host system. Which is really no different than not having zones. Zones are a horrible horrible mess.
- No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are months to years behind there linux counterparts.
- Java performs better on x64 than Solaris/SPARC. This has boggled me for years. Only recent sparc architectures let java and other highly threaded applications stacks really perform well. Why do I even have to know about processor binding for processes?
No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are months to years behind there linux counterparts.
This is something that has boggled my mind for nigh-on twenty years. Eighteen of them, I guess. Linux came with all the latest tools, but in order to get them for Solaris you'd have to download some old tools and use them to build some new tools. Ultimately I think it's really all about selling you the sunspro compilers, or whatever they're called now, two decades on. If it's too easy to just use gcc, nobody will ever buy sunspro, for which they want a massive stack of cash. It's the only compiler that generates very good SPARC code, and it costs a million billion dollars so many people didn't bother to buy it, and went GCC instead. And then they were throwing away performance. If you're going to run those tools, you might as well run them on x86-Linux. And in fact, that's been eroding Solaris steadily for all this time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
as many people do - get a copy of an app inspector - I recommend Addons Detector - and use it to see what dev tools were used for build the apps on your phone. You'll be surprised to see just how many were built with the NDK. All the fast and responsive games are at least.
So what can you program in that those execs will give you a green light for? I mean they really don't make good decisions off of their choices. They really just pick what they think they like.
PHP/Python/Ruby etc... It is those nasty open source freeware programs that may be out of style in a few year, we don't want to use those. (and they don't seem to have those mythical enterprise features that they want, but yet never tell us what they are)
C/C++ Too cumbersome to code in, doesn't allow for Rapid Development
C#/VB.NET Well they are fine for little apps, we want something a little more heavy duty. Sometimes you will get a better debate about needing a more scailable servers then what Microsoft can provide.
COBOL/FORTRAN/FoxPro etc... These old languages.
Unfortunately Java, even with its security problems is seen as the best enterprise choice, because Companies thinks for some ungodly stupid reason that Enterprise software is some how good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.